This poor little girl, whose mother considers her less important than a credit card. She even tells the workers who watched her daughter to say it's her daughter that's lost next time so she knows not to rush.

Similarly, there's this poor little boy whose mother left him at the museum and had driven more than three hours before the museum called to tell her - and her major concern was her coat.

A minor one here. She wants to know how to treat a rash on her butt, but doesn't want health services to know, so she calls tech support for computers, of all places. When she is told tech support can't help her, she hangs up while sobbing.

It's hard not to feel sorry for this guy/girl who is accused of ruining a boy's 13th birthday because of a problem with the ovens that is in no way the worker's fault. To add insult to injury, it was the submitter's own birthday too.

This one doesn't sound sad until you put it in hindsight. You can bet this little girl's gonna grow up a Spoiled Brat. After finding a roll of lost money, she is told by her mother to keep it. When the cashier tells her she cannot keep it unless 30 days pass without someone claiming it, the family lie to another employee in order to get it. Later on, the person who actually lost the money comes and finds out their money has been taken by someone else.

Similarly, this kid's gonna grow up to be a criminal, being told by his father to steal candy bars. If the cashier hadn't been fluent in Japanese (the father spoke Japanese, assuming the cashier wouldn't understand), he would've gotten away with it.

This one's especially horrifying to people who are friends to all living things. Two kids grab butterflies from an exhibit with their fists, possibly hurting them, and when they are told to stop, their mother says that they should be allowed to do whatever they want to them, and tries to apply Never Say "Die" to real life. She has to be forcibly removed from the exhibit in the end.

This one features rude customers, awesome customers... and a 70-year-old cashier who has to work to afford chemotherapy.

It's hard not to feel bad for the regular in this story, especially if you're an animal lover and/or have a beloved pet yourself. A customer's hamster has a tumor and must be put down. She wants to give the hamster one final treat first, but another customer comes and grabs the hamster's box from her hands without permission. The customer thinks that a hamster-loving friend would like to see a hamster that is about to die.

This post seems like an ordinary bigot post, with a violent customer who insults the cashier with homophobic comments and physical threats, until the end, where a second one comes around!

This is just depressing. You'd expect underage drinking from 17- or 18-year-olds, but ten-year-olds?!

Unless the first boy was just parroting his elder relatives' or friends' opinions. Which seems likely since he doesn't know the difference between beer and rum.

This. Unlike most things on this list, it's also a Heartwarming Moment: After a family's dog had to be euthanized, an Air Force lieutenant who lost his brother to cancer cheers the 10-year old son by telling him that if he did his best to make the dog's life worth living, the dog would be proud.

This homeowner who had to deal with asshole golfers who think they can go wherever they want is bad enough, but it gets worse when he lists all the trouble they've put him through—not only have they broken into and wrecked his property, they killed his dog. When people value a damn golf game over life, you know you're dealing with some really scummy folks.

This story which is also heartwarming — an eight-year old kid goes above and beyond what is expected for a kid his age to make sure his neighbor, who recently suffered a tragedy, has a Christmas, and moves everyone else to help any way they can.

This poor girl. Her birthday was supposed to be celebrated together with her divorced parents but her mother shown her hateful homophobia after learning her new friend's older sister is a lesbian and storms out, ruining the kid's birthday wishes. On the bright side (well sort of) the father subsequently got full custody and now the little girl is allowed to play with her friend and learn Spanish as well.

This poor girl just wants a dragon toy, but her mother won't let her. Then she tries to get a toy dog, but her mother won't get her that either because it's not pink. Then her mother tells her that she can't get a toy unless it's pink and 'girly', and then her mother tells the stunned cashier that girls who don't play with pink toys will be gay and that her daughter needs to 'learn her place'. Jesus Christ.

An otherwise normal tech support call about an elderly man trying to access his voicemail takes a depressing turn when he admits that the reason why was because his wife passed away recently and he wanted to hear her voice again via an old voicemail message.

From Not Always Romantic

This narrator's friend received condolences rather than congratulations on his wedding.

Hard not to feel sorry for thispoor guy for his failed proposal attempt.

Although it does get better if you think that they were just joking around.

From Not Always Related

This writer. Her father forgot her own birthday, but instead gives a birthday present to her stepsister, whose own birthday is a week away. And then, when the submitter doesn't wish him a happy birthday a few months later, he calls her an "awful selfish daughter".

An elderly mother of two works herself into an early grave because she's too stubborn to hire someone to help her with mowing the lawn (the lawn is on a steep incline and has to be kept short per HA rules). While the OP has some excuse to have not been able to help, her brother only says that he shouldn't be expected to do any work just because he's a man when asked why he never helped despite being fit enough to do so. Let this sink in: His mother died early because he was too lazy to help her with the yard work and he doesn't seem to care.

From Not Always Learning

One story on this section of the site takes place during finals week. A girl comes up to the storyteller complaining that the copy machine hasn't printed her things. A tech goes with her to look, and the girl runs by in tears because she'd accidentally put her report through the shredder.

Not really a Tear Jerker, but kinda depressing: This one student in an advanced French class is always late, and when she does come, she sleeps through most of the class. However, her homework is always done, and she does very well on exams. Then one day, the student has had enough of this, and says, in French, "I hate all my classmates.". The teacher is surprised that she would blatantly insult everyone in class, but the student is confident that nobody actually understood her. The teacher confirmed that NOBODY in the class understood that fairly-basic-French sentence, and were only there because EVERYONE had cheated for the entire term by using translators. The student was then moved into a class where people were actually interested in learning French.

One college student calls out a teacher who she used to respect for completely ignoring her during a lecture and trying to humiliate her in front of the class for not coming to her class the day before. As she's finally able to explain to the teacher and class, her daughter had been run over by a truck, so the student had spent the day near her daughter instead of coming to class. She gives the teacher an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech before leaving, never to return again.

From Not Always Friendly

You have to feel bad for this poor boy, he gets inspired to draw a lot more by an artist's pep talk, but his mother ruins it completely by telling him that he has no talent and that since no one else in the family can draw, he can't either.

This poor guy. Being invited to dinner with your high school friends, only for them to forget about you and then completely blank you has got to sting.

From Not Always Hopeless

This sad story here. A young Chinese girl used to be a brat at a Chinese restaurant despite attempts by her mother telling her daughter to behave and be a proper lady. Then one day, the little girl and her parents stop coming to the restaurant. Three months later, the little girl returns to the restaurant with her father and much to the staff's surprise, she is behaving well and is polite to them. But then comes the Wham Line on why the sudden change of behavior: the mother was killed in car accident three months ago. The little girl, not understanding that her mother is gone, thought her mother left her because she was naughty, and became a proper lady which she hoped would make her mother come back.

This story of befriending a racist elderly neighbor is downright depressing. She's been abandoned by her own family, has no friends or caretakers, and can no longer keep up with her own housework.

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